Bosch Praesideo unites Houston hospital campus
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In keeping with Houston Methodist’s approach to medicine, efficient communications across all 10 downtown buildings was a critical need. Walker recommended Bosch Praesideo digital public address and emergency sound system as a scalable, flexible enterprise solution to serve the new Walter Tower and unite it with the rest of the campus.
“We had previously upgraded several of the medical centre‘s suburban facilities, but the downtown campus was a different kind of challenge,” notes Matt Kenjura, manager of technology preconstruction for Walker. “Each existing building had its own legacy paging system, and the goal was to find an operational approach that could pull those patchwork analogue systems into a modern digital environment, and do it without downtime to critical communications. Bosch Praesideo has the flexibility and scalability to keep all these adjacent systems working throughout the transition.”
In a hospital environment, communications is a critical component of efficient care delivery, most notably when a patient requires immediate assistance. Houston Methodist’s goal was to allow system-wide call distribution while enabling floor-level and single-building traffic to function without losing any of the 1700-plus daily PA calls.
Walker Engineering’s approach was to harness each outlying building’s system by converting the audio signal to digital with Bosch Praesideo, enabling the system’s control network to work with the existing analogue amplifiers and transducers. These systems, in turn, are chained together based on which side of the street the building is located, essentially creating two primary control loops. An additional Praesideo system then connects all the buildings together to enable campus-wide calls. This nested architecture functions as the core for the distribution network.
“All the mission-critical campus-wide paging resides on the network, backed up by two redundancy networks,” explains Matt Kenjura. “There’s a Praesideo network controller and audio expander in each building. Calls are routed according to priority, and are routed locally on the floor, within a building, or across the campus. The key is reliability and intelligibility, because a Code Blue call is literally life-or-death.”
Overall, the downtown Houston Methodist Hospital campus is operating roughly 3,000 audio channels to nearly 7,000 speakers across 126 zones in its 10 buildings, all running through a total of 14 interconnected Praesideo systems. Beyond paging, the network handles data, intercom, access-controlled video surveillance, cable TV, and mass notification of life safety systems.
(Jim Evans)
